


A Terre

by RacetrackBatsman



Series: And Death Shall Have No Dominion [2]
Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - World War I, Gen, Internal Monologue, World War I setting, dealing with religion, dreams death and heresy, pondering ones own mortality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-01-26
Packaged: 2021-02-19 15:21:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22413097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RacetrackBatsman/pseuds/RacetrackBatsman
Summary: A pause at Bullecourt leaves Lieutenant John Irving questioning. He questions what should not be questioned and wonders about his place in God's plan.Fill for The Terror Bingo Square: Borrowed Time
Series: And Death Shall Have No Dominion [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1548133
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	A Terre

Boys martyred like saints, lying across barbed wire. Eyes wide, blood stained. What God allows this? What God allows His loyal believers to die here? Slaughtered over what? A disagreement over land? Over power?

I did not want this! This was not what I had envisioned as God’s plan. And yet here I am. In the mud of Bullecourt. I have survived too much already. Made it untouched through the Dardanelles, through the Somme. Is this some great lesson from God? If it is I cannot see why. To me this seems futile. More futile the longer it drags on. The more bodies that are strewn across no man’s land.

We place our lives in each other’s hands. Hoping that they will hold their portion of the line, their end of an unspoken bargain. It is not orders that keeps us here now, but the need to protect each other. My faith in fellow men somehow has become much stronger than the faith I had in God. Heretical though that may be. But it presses in my mind that God has simply abandoned us; or perhaps he had never been there from the start. There is nothing to remind me of God’s grace here. Nothing has the chance to grow and thrive in these decimated lands. I wonder if the blood from men will encourage something in the future. Perhaps this place will be beautiful again once the shelling stops. Once we are all permitted to heal. God’s will or not.

And yet I cannot see myself surviving to see it. I roll my rifle in my hands, the dents catching on the skin of my fingers. Hard to imagine that these hands were once soft and clean. Loved so gently by my mother before her untimely passing. Taught kindness to show kindness to God’s creations. Taught to paint in watercolours to capture the beauty of life. Strange to imagine that scarcely a couple of years ago these hands were tending to sheep on a station in Australia. As much as that endeavour was a failure, my current predicament finds me melancholic for that place. For the strange mottled browns and greens of the Australian Eucalyptus trees. I did not appreciate them while I was there. I should have painted them more; found a way to capture the colours of them to contrast them to the greys of Scotland. Now I can hardly find the drive to create. There is nothing here to remember. Just blood and rot. To paint it with the gentleness of a standard scenery would do the people an injustice. There is no replication of this.

Perhaps He has abandoned us. Perhaps after all the chances, even sending His own son to die for us, He has decided that humanity is not worth His love. After centuries of disappointment and sin He has had enough and condemned us to a death in this mud. Or perhaps He had never cared at all? An uncaring God seems more palatable than one who leaves His prized creation to the slaughter, to this Hell on Earth. I cannot imagine Hell being worse than this. The constant echo of the shells, of gunfire. The whistle overhead of gas filled weapons and the scramble to then survive. I have known my share of sadness in my life; but this is worse. This is so much worse than all I’ve seen before.

I try to keep faith. Hold true to the belief that God has a plan. His predetermined destination for us; for me. Yet that faith is faltering in a way that frightens me to my core. I have felt it faltering since the failure at the Dardanelles, continuing to drain away with the subsequent losses at the Somme. What God would leave His faithful to that? To the hills of Gallipoli where the Ottoman could always see your position and death was only ever a breath away? Like Lieutenant Gore of Erebus Company, shot by a sniper as he was simply moving through his platoon’s trench. Why would God allow a man so kind and jovial die in such a way?

And yet a man like Cornelius Hickey survives; even thrives? War was made for a man like him. Someone with a selfish heart whose only true desire has ever been to survive; no matter the cost. Even if that cost must be paid in the blood of others. He was in Lieutenant Hodgson’s platoon on Gallipoli, yet joined mine in the post evacuation restructuring. I wish I had never met him. Wish I’d never laid eyes on such a Godless man. A man who takes a simple knife into trench raids rather than a standard club. A man who seems to delight in the spilling of enemy blood, of only for the power that it gives him over fellow men. Yet he seems so skilled with his words, knowing how to charm his fellow soldiers where all I seem to do is drive them away. Silver tongue hidden behind a benign smile. I wonder if his hands will be stained red after the end? Like talons of a bird after pulling apart their prey. Is it just the enemy within his claws?

Is it wrong to say I fear him? Cornelius Hickey is a demon and the wrath of God in human form. In the snippets of sleep I am able to claim he haunts my dreams. Dragging his knife across my skin. Some nights the dreams feel more real. That I can feel the cold metal of the knife as it splits my skin and delves into my torso; allowing a river of blood to spill. Spilling until the point of drowning. Filling my lungs and eyes. Covering everything in a deep red until the only point of difference is the harsh blue of Hickey’s eyes. When I wake those eyes haunt me. Perhaps it is proximity? I can see him; touch him, prove that he is real and flesh unlike the enemy in trenches across fields. An enemy who I can only experience through sound and gunfire.

I imagine those dreams are my Hell. A true Hell away from this physical plain. A reminder of what awaits me once my time is up. Denial of that would continue my decent into heresy. Yet admitting that was true would show the hypocrisy of God. “Thall shall not kill,” and yet there are those amongst the cloth that say this war is just and right in the eyes of the Lord. How can both exist at once? How can a God be on the side of the Germans and English both? There would be some that say that the German’s are an evil that need to be removed. That they do not fit under the instructions of that commandment due to their depravity. But they did not start this war. So could they truly be the evil that we claim them to be? Can we justify this cruelty?

Does cruelty need justification?

Regardless there is no justification for this. For the waking nightmare of the guns. You do not think of death in the moment, but it creeps up on you in the silence. When the moon is full and the guns lay still and you wonder when the bullets will choose you. When your flesh will be that which is splayed across the fields. Your own blood mixing with the mud. Red becoming brown as life drains down. Down. It is easier to think of death as separate to one’s self. It can happen, but not to me. I will not hurt my family like that, to die here in an unmarked grave. Yet it sits over your head. Weighing on your shoulders. There, eternally there. No God. No Devil. Just the inevitability of death.

Can God even see us here? Are we crystalline to his eyes under the mustard gas and mortar smoke? Are our souls visible even with the blood that comes from the men we have killed? Rather than being swept up, perhaps I would have been better had I stayed in Scotland; fought against the tides of war. I would have remained insufferably righteous, but it would have remained closer to the clauses of my faith. I would not have started to doubt it.

As this war drags on I lose more and more of my own platoon. Each death I carry with me as a failure. I wonder if Major Crozier does the same. How many deaths would he number against his soul? I have heard him talk in meetings about the futility of all this, yet it truly remains out of his control. No matter how much he wishes to save us, he cannot. Perhaps it is the same for God. Perhaps He sees us but He cannot intervene, cannot pull us all back from the brink. So He waits. Waits to catch us at the end, bring us to His side and apologise for allowing the devil to get so close to corrupting all human hearts. I’d like to think that. I want to think that. But it is getting harder to think that way. To think that this was out of His control.

My faith is in the men beside me. In men like Thomas Hartnell whose earnest kindness and drive has kept my own spirits up. Who remains cheery despite the loss of his brother in the cold Gallipoli winter. Or in the likes of Doctor MacDonald who is able to keep men together, to keep them alive before they are shipped away; whose blood covered hands are not from cruelty, but from kindness.

I wonder where I fall; between the likes of them and the likes of Hickey. Do my men see me as salvation or destruction? Can they see my faltering faith in the sermons I provide? Is false hope better than none? Can I promise them Heaven when all I can see is Hell? False prophets are condemned. I am not Major Crozier. I do not have the strange warmth that he has. I do not have the charisma or Captain Fitzjames of Erebus Company either. Without my faith, what am I?

What am I but a man living on borrowed time?

**Author's Note:**

> I know I said that I would keep the WW1 stories to a minimum; but this was another idea that grabbed my mind quite tightly. 
> 
> It is probably quite obvious now that a vast amount of my knowledge on the First World War is based upon the ANZAC experience. There were British battalions at Bullecourt but it is predominantly remembered as an Australian battle. It was ultimately a futile fight; the area had little strategic value and was considered a meat grinder. I believe that after the tragedy of the Somme, and the futility of many battles after, it could lead to doubt in one’s own faith. I’ve known people to doubt for less. 
> 
> Title again from a Wilfred Owen poem. Something I'll stick with throughout these WW1 stories.
> 
> Once again feedback is always welcomed! You can also find me on tumblr at cmdrjamesfitzjames


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